Still Googling Your Contacts? Nimble Says Kiss That Goodbye

Nimble, the customer relationship management application that automatically connects social networks with other contact information, has just kicked it up a notch. The company claims you can quit Googling your contacts to find out more about them.

Nimble recently introduced a new feature called Smart Summary that company executives say accomplishes far beyond what most CRM applications can. The app uses social intelligence when compiling information about your most important contacts.

Smart Summary compiles this information on the fly assembling a user-friendly overview of important information about a contact. Now you can see at a glance what’s most important about all those to whom you are connected.

That includes details like Facebook and LinkedIn connections, Klout score, website URLs and more.

According to Alyson Stone, Director of Content Strategy at Nimble, what’s different about Smart Summary is that the profile is created automatically once you have identified a contact.

The information is pulled from publicly available sources and compiled by the Nimble app into a “dossier-type” format. While other applications may have fields where you can summarize information, you typically have to manually enter it. Or you get bits and pieces of information, without seeing a good overview of your contact. Not only does Nimble create the summary initially, Stone emphasizes, but it updates it daily to reflect changes.

What’s more, the information is “portable.” In an email conversation with Small Business Trends, Stone explained:

“…users can click the Share button next to the Title ‘Smart Summary’ and are then able to quickly email a Smart Summary dossier to anyone. This is aimed at making it easier for people to become known as ‘super connectors’ who help others meet.”

Harvesting Social Intelligence

Unlike searching for available information about contacts on Google, Nimble uses social intelligence, drawing data from social profiles like LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare and other social sites.

From these, it creates a mini-profile including experience, education, shared connections, location and more.

In addition to basic background like work experience and education, Nimble’s Smart Summary also identifies shared influential topics with your contacts based on social media activity. For example, if one of your contacts posts regularly on topics like social media or content marketing, these topics might also be listed with his or her profile.

The app uses keywords in common between the you and your contacts to help emphasize common interests and ideas. The mini-profile sits at the right side of your contact screen while the app is open.

According to Stone, the problem that Nimble’s Smart Summary is designed to solve is the overwhelm from being involved in so many social networks. These networks provide so much information that it’s hard to keep it straight. Nimble, she says, aims to address this issue by organizing the important information and helping you step back to see the forest instead of just the trees. First, it takes away the grunt work of inputting all the information manually. Then it frees you of the need to update that information regularly.

But also, Stone says, the app allows you to prioritize the information and contacts you are most interested in keeping up with. This is handled through a “Mark as Important” button that organizes your contacts based on your priorities.

Stone explained:

“Nimble offers you the choice to mark any contact as “Important.” The effect of this action is that the system will present their updates and communications to you at the top of the results. Marking someone as important is a way of keeping the most important people front and center.”

Here’s a closer look at how Nimble’s Smart Summary works:

Nimble, based in Santa Monica, California, was founded in 2009 by Jon Ferrara, who previously founded GoldMine. Nimble has more than 60,000 customers. Well over half of those are small to medium sized businesses.

Like more and more leading apps these days, Nimble offers a freemium model with a free personal plan, and a paid business plan. The company also offers a no-credit card limited free trial. Nimble integrates with over 45 other applications. They include Constant Contact, Freshbooks, Google Contacts, AWeber, Evernote, MailChimp, GoToWebinar, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Magento and Xero.

Anita Campbell is the Founder and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses, and also serves as CEO of TweakYourBiz.com.

4 Reactions

Anita: Would you say that Smart Summary is similar to Rapportive’s Gmail plugin service (owned by SlideShare)?

I enjoyed Brent Leary’s interview with Jon Ferrara very much. I got an aha-moment!

I wrote the following in my post, Brent Leary’s Interview with Jon Ferrara of Nimble:

Nimble could be the perfect tool for my worklife and transform the F.I.X IT! productivity approach into an integrated workflow system, combining my social media activities and educational process for supply chain management (purchasing & logistics) professionals. Could this be the optimal solution for a lifestyle design architect?

Thank you for sharing how Nimble can help solopreneurs and teams harness the power of Social Selling to power the growth of their business via more effective simple, intelligent relationship management.

Now with the addition of Nimble Anywhere they can Nimble ‘em everywhere they work via our new Nimble Chrome Extension and Widget 2.0 – http://bit.ly/1hnRvUn

We appreciatte your kind support of our mission to be the trusted source of business insights to power mutually benificial business relationships.

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